“Even boulders break, I can tell you
Not because of aging …. I can tell you, when boulders break it comes as a surprise – as it does with people …
(Daliah Rabikovitz)
The title of the exhibition is “Protecting Broken Boulders” which refers to the poetry of Daliah Ravikovitz “Pride” which intuitively is associated with the images in the exhibition of Haya Graetz-Ran. The boulders and stones in her drawings relate to the state of the human race and reveals human feelings. However, the exhibition artwork hints at other meanings which refer to pioneering women from the time of first immigrations who worked as well as guarded, hidden behind everything is mental breakdown together with the discovery of self-sacrifice and bravery.
Haya Graetz-Ran is a much appreciated figurative painter who showed her works at important exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel, Europe, Japan and the United States and her artistic path is represented with oil painting on cloth and hard surfaces similar to other formats which relate to working surfaces – (used chopping boards) for women and male work (with a trowel).
Graetz-Ran’s drawings touch on the history of the first settlers in the country of Israel, in an attempt to bring to life artistically the pioneering feminine voice which almost absent from the overwhelming ethos of the male Zionist movement. She reconstructs historical scenes by using photographs from archives, breaking down images, and reconstructing them with a new vision creating a point of view and a different voice of the women pioneers of Israel.
The choice of the pioneering, working and guarding women is not by chance. Since the 1980s Graetz-Ran has investigated the pioneering feminine character, when they were young idealists at the time their lives were being formed. They lived in a supposedly ideal community, at a time when the male pioneer character was an elitist within the framework of the Zionist movement. The contradiction between the ideal equal community and the reality had unequal manifestations. This lack of equality was very hard for the women to handle.
The connection of Graetz-Ran to the women pioneer movement concerns her own personal world. She creates an intimate dialogue with them and through her drawing she strums their passions and brings them to life. She puts them in the middle of the creation and re-evaluates the woman as a positive change force and as she does this she allows for a different point of view of the first Hebrew settlement in Israel.
The artistic dialogue of Haya Graetz-Ran exists first and foremost with the subject and objectives that find their way into her drawings. She holds a dialogue between the artistic currents in the international art world and in her drawings you can find influences from the renaissance artists, the pre-Raphaelites and the modern day art movement. The choice to use art techniques which were common in the past, on raw linen, empowers the message that Graetz-Ran is trying to deliver in her art work. The background color of the fabric makes a connection to the primary motive and the texture of the earth and the materials dictate her work process. She breaks up the photographic objects and reconstructs them on the fabric and thus pours her personal story into the characters. Her drawings are asking the viewer to take a second deep look thus exposing other layers to him.
In her book “The Second Sex” (1949), Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘this role of compassion and tenderness was allotted to the woman. Even when the woman is well assimilated in society she is gently widening her boundaries, because she was blessed with the slippery generosity of life.’
The artwork “the carer in Tel Hai” (2016) where the young carer character appears, full of ‘compassion and tenderness’, dressed in nurses’ uniform, with a white cap on her head and a mask covering part of her face, is a connection to the present time at the peak of a universal pandemic, so we can almost see that Graetz-Ran predicted the future. In this piece of work Graetz-Ran is breaking down and re-constructing the iconic memorial rock of the “Roaring Lion”, when she put the lion statue in an incubator, his role is to provide consistent conditions of temperature and pressure to living creatures. The character of the nurse with a large syringe injecting new blood into the statue in the incubator and thus revives the starving myth. It seems that Graetz-Ran is creating an independent micro-cosmos in the incubator, while the viewer is looking from the outside, as the carer is looking at the statue.
The exhibition that is presented in the museum of ‘Beit HaShomer ‘ identifies with the narrative of the young pioneer women – the women of the ‘ Shomer’, who championed equality for women who strived to promote it even within the ‘Shomer Movement’. In a letter they wrote in 1918 to the Shomer members they protested that they were forbidden from becoming full members for guarding, decision making and being included in confidential matters. They strived with all their might to be an inseparable part of everything being formed within the organization and the country and to earn a full partnership from a place where they see themselves as equal, but their demand was not fully answered. The tale of Haya Graetz-Ran’s art continues the dialogue with the female guards and the pioneer women of the Galilee and is creating a renewed dialogue with the ethos of the pioneer shomer within his own home ‘Beit HaShomer’. Beit HaShomer museum is part of our legacy and the museum section in the wing of the perpetuation and legacy of families, the ministry of security.
Written by: Bosmat Hareuveni Zeevi
Curators: Zohar Monsenego and Bosmat Hareuveni Zeevi
Head Curator: Ofer Board
